ArcherMind Joins 96Boards and Launches Deci-Core ARMv8 Product

New Board Offers Mediatek Soc with Two ARM Cortex-A72, Eight Cortex-A53 cores and a Mali-T880 GPU for Full Range of Processor Performance

This is a unique opportunity for us to combine MediaTek’s high performance hardware technology with Linaro’s open source expertise and our own specialized software services to make a product for all types of developers.

Linaro Ltd, the collaborative engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM® architecture, today announced that ArcherMind Technology (Nanjing) Co., Ltd has joined the 96Boards initiative as a Steering Committee Member and Manufacturing Partner and they are preparing the launch of their first 96Boards product.

ArcherMind’s board will put one of the most advanced ARM-based SOCs into the hands of all types of developers - from individual hobbyists building one-off projects to commercial engineering teams developing the next generation of mass market mobile and IoT products. The Mediatek X20 (MT6797) deci-core ARMv8 SoC offers four ARM Cortex-A53 cores for basic processing, four ARM Cortex-A53 cores for mid- to heavy-use cases, and two ARM Cortex-A72 for bursts of maximum performance along with an advanced ARM Mali-T880 MP4 graphics chip clocked to 800MHz. This enables the board to deliver unprecedented performance for a whole host of different applications. The board is available for pre-order on the AlphaStar website.

“Our collaboration with MediaTek and 96Boards is designed to empower our customers,” said Bin Du, CTO of ArcherMind. “This is a unique opportunity for us to combine MediaTek’s high performance hardware technology with Linaro’s open source expertise and our own specialized software services to make a product for all types of developers. We are committed to supporting this community and look forward to seeing the innovative solutions that they develop.”

Founded in 2006, ArcherMind is a global, professional software service supplier specializing in software product design, code development, quality assurance, technology support, etc. The company is devoted to providing specialized world-wide software R&D services and focusing on R&D and consulting service in the field of mobile devices and wireless internet software. Headquartered in Nanjing, China, it also has offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen ,Wuhan, Xi’an and Guangzhou and is active in North America, Europe, Japan and Korea.

“ArcherMind has a track record of providing platform software solutions to many leading companies and I’m excited to see them joining the 96Boards initiative,” said Yang Zhang, Director of 96Boards. “What makes this partnership particularly interesting is that it involves collaboration with another one of our members - MediaTek. This is a perfect example of what makes Linaro and 96Boards so unique - we offer a common platform upon which members can collaborate and thereby accelerate innovation.”

96Boards is the first open specification to define a platform for the delivery of compatible low-cost, small footprint 32-bit and 64-bit Cortex-A boards from the range of ARM SoC vendors. There are currently two 96Boards specifications for low-cost ARMv7-A and ARMv8-A development boards: The Consumer Edition (CE), which targets the mobile, embedded and digital home segments, and the Enterprise Edition (EE), which targets the networking and server segments. To find out more, please visit http://www.96Boards.org.

About Linaro

Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the ARM ecosystem. The company has over 250 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, ARM power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaro’s growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

To ensure commercial quality software, Linaro’s work includes comprehensive test and validation on member hardware platforms. The full scope of Linaro engineering work is open to all online. To find out more, please visit http://www.linaro.org.